Lines Can Separate or They Can Connect
by Daria234
Summary: How Eliot and Alec balance love, art, morality, and violence. Inspired by a Wilde quote - see fic . Alec/Eliot SLASH, don't read if you don't like. Warnings for dark themes, implied violence, not very happy stuff.


Written for comment_fic on livejournal

Prompt was for Leverage, Alec/Eliot, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace." (quote from Oscar Wilde)

When Eliot was younger - when he was Hardison's age - he thought of hitting as an art form. Not just in the sense of a martial art, as in a discipline. In the sense that a well-laid strike was a thing of beauty. A perfect line from floor to thigh to hip to shoulder to fist, the light spatter of blood like grace notes in an aria.

Beautiful. And beauty doesn't need a reason. It was art for art's sake.

So Eliot didn't care too much about who was doing the hiring. But then he spent a few years running neck-deep in the kinds of struggles that can't be solved with hitting. The kind where the cycles of violence got turned by people far above Eliot's sightlines. And, more than once, he had to break his one hard and fast rule, his one claim to morality. He killed. It was necessary and unavoidable, and it was always to save his own life or someone else's. But it made him wonder about himself. It made him wonder if there were any line he wouldn't cross.

Even now, with the team, with all their jobs that make Eliot feel like he's making up for something, he wonders about where his line is. Because he knows that if it came down to it, he would kill to protect them. And he would do it without hesitation, even knowing that it would make them gape in horror, even knowing that it would make them think twice about having him on the team at all.

Eliot wonders about himself. About what kind of man he is. But as he looks at Hardison sleeping next to him, the long lines of his body stretching out before him, his breath strong and hot near Eliot's cheek, it's hard for him to care that all the lines are dissolving. The demarcations that held down things in their separate categories: right and wrong, protector and aggressor, him and me. All dissolving, all swirling about in Eliot's thoughts like paint on the surface of water.

********============**********=============**************

Alec had been reading about art. Parker and Sophie's art-theft convos had intrigued him, so he decided to read up.

It turns out that most of the greatest works of art in history were created by broken-hearted people.

So the destruction of love means the creation of art.

And maybe it followed that the birth of love means the destruction of art.

Because the first time Alec did a hack he wasn't proud of was the first time he realized how much Eliot meant to him.

It was a sloppy job. He had done hurried work before, but this was different. It was the product of a distracted mind. It lacked grace.

It lacked artistry.

It was well known to the team (and rather good-naturedly accepted, which Alec appreciated) that Alec kept tabs on the team electronically. It was not as well-known that Alec was also digging up information on who their past enemies were, and keeping a close eye on _them_. Nate (of course) had figured out that Alec was watching Sterling, and had asked him to forward all info to Nate himself. But Alec specifically said that he would like the little side surveillance project to be a secret from the rest of team. And that he wanted to continue to monitor the list of grudge-holders and enemies. Especially the really, really long and really, really lethal one.

Eliot's list.

Nate just nodded and asked Alec to tell him if there was a problem.

Alec lied and said that he would.

Because Alec knew that some of these guys who were gunning for Eliot couldn't be handled with Nate's methods.

Or even Eliot's methods.

And Alec had never in his life so much as thrown a punch at someone who wasn't in the process of hitting him.

But then Alec found out that Viktor aka The Slicer was out of jail, and running guns, and emailing various hit men Eliot's description. And he had put out a reward for anyone who had a good photo of the man who had turned him in - which, Alec knew, would make any killer with a facial recognition program and a tenth of Alec's computer skills able to track Eliot down.

And then it was a few quick keystrokes that made it look like Viktor was stealing from his bosses. Not an artful hack. But Alec didn't want to spend too long thinking about what he was doing.

A day later, all activity on all of Viktor's accounts stopped.

Alec told everyone he had the flu that day. That was why he kept vomiting.

Love wasn't necessarily good for art, Alec knew. Art is all about knowing where to draw the lines.

But in love, sometimes you keep crossing the line until it's just a smear of something you can't get back.


End file.
